Friday, January 15, 2016

Does Derren Brown use NLP?

Over the years, we have debated whether Derren Brown uses NLP (neuro-lingusitic programming) in his act. One the one hand, he clearly has been trained in NLP (on YouTube you can find an old Paul McKenna NLP training video with a young Derren in the audience). On the other, he has vehemently condemned NLP as a cult-like pseudo-science (see Derren's book, Tricks of the Mind).

NLP practitioners insist that Derren's denials are a ruse, and that his act is reliant on NLP. Professional magicians roll their eyes, point out that most of these tricks can be accomplished with conventional magic tricks, and insist that the NLP is just a convenient (and misleading) story.

The debate reages on, and here is a recent installment, in which an NLP practitioner argues that it really is NLP making Derren's act work: DerrenBrownNLP